NUP; The Poor People’s Party

There must come a time when the poor must realise that the only people who are pro-poor are the poor themselves. There’s no pro-poor political party in this country. Not one.
Then there are parties that are not necessarily anti-poor, but are equally not anti-capital. Parties work towards promotion of a middle class, Their desire is not necessarily to annihilate the system that creates the poor, it is to ensure that the poor somehow benefit from that system. What they want, in essence, is “capitalism with a heart”, whatever that means. .
And then of course there are parties who are pro-poor only in so far as the poor are useful for the sustaining of their rhetoric. These parties survive on the poor, they have groups like poor-youth and so forth. Despite their progressive pro-poor sloganeering, given control of the state, they will never create a truly egalitarian society, because such a society would render them irrelevant. So for their survival, there MUST be the poor, because without the poor to claim to represent, they have nothing to give this country. May we someday understand exactly what Che Guevara meant when he said “there are no liberators – the people liberate themselves”. Otherwise we are doomed to await messiahs.

The National Unity Platform (NUP) mainly derives it’s mileage from the poor people and blames the current government for the poverty levels of the masses. This is against a background that the Principal of NUP seems to be doing well and thriving, To be fair to him, in some of his songs,he has pointed out the inequities of the state. When Barbie Kyagulanyi, the wife was asked about why they are thriving, she put it this way,”emuli mu nkototo” implying that those are roses in the concrete and it reminded of something I had written.

Political commentary gives you certain powers to see and predict, I for one predicted Robert Kyagulanyi’s rise to Parliament as early as July,2016. He got into Parliament in a by-election in 2017.

One can ably say that for as long as the poor and wretched of the earth exist, NUP will continue having political mileage. Granted, things are bad in the governance but the Principal can begin by telling the poor how he managed to thrive under the dictatorship otherwise for as long as the poor exist, that is political capital for the NUP.